I'm a self-taught developer working at the intersection of software engineering and growth marketing. I started by needing tools that were too expensive or too limited off the shelf, so I built my own, and kept going.
That means I've dealt with the whole stack in production: OAuth flows and API rate limits, proxy management and session handling, background job queues, database design, DNS and deliverability, Nginx and SSL, backups and monitoring. When something breaks at 2 a.m., I'm the one who fixes it.
I default to simple, boring technology: Python and FastAPI on the backend, plain HTML/CSS/JS or Next.js on the frontend, SQLite or PostgreSQL for data, Docker for deployment. Small systems that one person can fully understand and operate.